This is a new story. It is the backstory of my PC in a D&D campaign I’m playing in. As the D&D campaign progresses, I’ll continue to write her “diary”, but that’s separate from this. In fact, if all goes as I plan, this will likely be the longest story I’ve written yet.

As much as I tried, I could find no appropriate images for Kreet as a child. If you search for “kobold girl”, you get a lot of images. But none appropriate for THIS story, which should be SFW. If I get the chance, I’ll see if I can commission someone to draw her. FurNut is my first choice. Sure he can go porny, but he also does the most awesomely cute work ever, and for this at least Kreet should be mega-cute.

Here’s what I’ve got so far, but PLENTY more to go. Like, tons in my head that I have to get out somehow. 

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The Long and Exciting Life of Kreet the Kobold.

They found 5 gold pieces, and one said he had leveled up. That was the sum total of what the Adventurers had managed to gain by slaughtering Kreet’s entire family. As the youngest member of her clutch, she was still hiding in the little cubby high above as she watched the torch bob back down the passage going deeper into the tunnels that were all she knew of life. Of course, they had expected this would happen eventually. The life of a kobold was notoriously short and even at her young age she didn’t really hate the people that regularly came venturing down into her home.

Usually her family just hid in one of the myriad tunnels that branched off of the main tunnel. Before her own family was wiped out she had seen four other clutches massacred and she’d learned that was just the way of her kind. Oh, they fought back. They always fought back. She’d heard of other races that had no concept of ownership, but the kobolds were certainly not that race! When some random Big Person, or more often, Big Persons found the home of a clan of kobolds, the kobolds would attack without reservation until the last one was dead. She knew that the top-dwellers considered them evil because of that.

There was no negotiating with a clan, it was true. There was only fight and kill or die. Later she would learn that there were alternatives, but no one she had met in her short life understood that. Now they were all dead, and the little box that held her family’s five gold pieces lay smashed into splinters, stained red with the blood of her father. She wept silently, waiting for the torch light to fade completely from view before she ventured out into the little space that she had called home. She wasn’t worried about visibility. She could see in pitch darkness due to the unique structure of her eyes. But even the flicker from a distant torch would reveal more than she really wanted to see of what remained of her family. Her dark-vision would be blessedly monochromatic.

A sniffle escaped her snout, unbidden. It wasn’t much. Just the quietest of sniffles. But apparently it was enough. One of the Adventurers apparently was still nearby and heard it. He had been sitting silently just outside her vision in the darkness. Now he lit a torch and she tried to shrink back again, eyes wide with fear. She knew enough about Adventurers to know they never stopped investigating till their curiosity was sated. She was doomed.

The problem with kobolds was not a lack of bravery, nor a lack of intelligence really. No, the problem with kobolds was a lack of size, strength and technology. Any average Big Person could kill an entire clutch if equipped with even modest armor and a steel blade. It didn’t help that the kobold would be pounding on his knees with his fists or trying to scale his legs to attack more vital bits. Once a kobold saw red, he would not relent until he was dead – which didn’t take very long usually. On the rare occasions that a group of kobolds actually gained enough technology to equip themselves with more than small sticks and wear anything more substantial than thin cloth, they could actually be formidable. But Kreet didn’t live in those circumstances. She was just one of a clan of kobolds living in an obscure network of caves in an even more obscure country above.

Security through obscurity had worked fairly well up till now. But she heard the man below searching for her, and she’d probably not see much more security as soon as she lost her obscurity. She was beginning to see red. Then a head came into view and she knew her time was up. She didn’t hesitate. It was in her blood. She attacked.

But instead of spending her last seconds scratching at the hair of her fated doom, she found herself instead inside a cage. She railed and screamed, but the Big Person who held the cage just looked at her.

At first she was happy to see he wasn’t wearing any metal. If she could get free of this cage, she very likely would be able to actually scratch him enough to make him bleed – and that would be a pretty significant victory, especially for such a young kobold.

“Calm down little one,” the Big Person said in her language. This startled her. She had never heard a Big Person speak in Kobold before. She’d never even heard tales of a Big Person that could talk properly. She looked at the huge head looking into her cage in front of her and cocked her head to one side. The red left her vision.

Another voice came down the passage and for a moment she saw one of the other Adventurers, his armored plate gleaming in his own torchlight.  The Big One that held her responded in that too-loud tongue of theirs, but with anger clearly in his voice. The other seemed to shrug, said something back in an offended tone, and returned the way he had come.

“Don’t worry little one. I’m not going to hurt you. I am returning to my home and I’m going to take you with me. I’m going to have to cover your cage though. The sunlight would hurt your eyes. But I’ll be right here.”

Kreet was too young to be anything but naive, and she had no experience with anything that could talk to her except other kobolds, yet they had always been trustworthy. So she didn’t hesitate to talk back to the man.

“You can talk to Kreet?”

“Oh! So you can talk? Yes little one, I can talk to you.”

“You killed my clutch? All dead?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Your family is gone so you might as well come with me, Kreet.”

“Why don’t you kill me?” she wondered, completely sincere, as a cloth was placed over the cage and she was rocked back and forth as the man walked out of her caverns.

“Why should I kill you, little one? Would you kill me if you could?”

Kreet was puzzled. “Yes. But I can’t. I am trapped in here.”

“No, you can’t. But I don’t want to kill you little one.”

“Why not? You killed my clutch.”

“That was not me. The other Big People I was with did that. I tried to stop them, but they have Gold Fever. I will not continue with them. I will go back to my home instead. Would you like to live with me? I would like to have someone to talk to.”

Once again Kreet didn’t understand. His words were clear enough, but his meaning was beyond her. “Would I like to live with you? Kreet doesn’t understand. Kreet would like to live with her clutch, but they are dead. Kreet wouldn’t like to live anywhere now.”

“Oh, I think you would. You might even like it.”

“Will there be other kobolds?” she asked hopefully, knowing that she shouldn’t think such things. Hope was not a survival factor in her life, but she was too young to have it completely removed from her psyche.

“No, Kreet. Only me and a cat.”

Kreet felt her heart sink. “Then I wouldn’t like to live there,” she said simply.

Though the cloth over her cage was dark, she could still see the light getting brighter.  Then soon she was outside. The sounds were different. The smells were different. She’d heard of the outside before of course. But she’d never been before.

“Are we outside?”

“Yes Kreet. Are you okay?” said the Big Person.

“My eyes hurt. It is too much light.”

“I know. I’m sorry Kreet. I’d let you go back into the caves, but there are no more kobolds there. I’ve been searching for your clan in there for a year or more. Yours was the last clan left. You’d starve or worse without them. Please accept my hospitality Kreet. I would like to be your friend.”

“You are Big People. Big People can’t be friends to kobolds. I think you might be crazy.”

The Big Person made a weird noise. Something like coughing. But then it talked again. “I think you are probably right Kreet. Please, I would like you to call me by my name. Could you do that for me?”

Kreet shrugged, knowing he couldn’t possibly see her. “Sure! What is your name?”

Though Kreet couldn’t properly form the word, she did her best given her vocabulary to repeat the sound he had said.

“Ka’Plo?”

“Yes! That is very close! Call me Ka’Plo, Kreet. Maybe we will be friends, you and me?”

“Ka’Plo is crazy. But Kreet has no choice, does she? I will be your friend if I can’t kill you.”

“Can you kill me?” Ka’Plo asked while cage swung to his walking rhythym.

Kreet lay down and wrapped her tail around one of the bars for support. “No. I can’t kill you. I’ll be your friend.”

Then she went to sleep.

——————————-

Kreet slept for a long time. It had been a long day. She vaguely wondered why her mother hadn’t woken her by now, but the rocking of her bed was too soothing so she stayed sleeping.

But then the rocking stopped and she opened her eyes and remembered where she was, and she cried quietly.

“Kreet? Are you awake?”

“I am awake Ka’Plo. I am sad.”

“I know Kreet. I’m going to take the cover off your cage. It’s night now and we’re outside.”

The darkness was lifted, but the light wasn’t too bright now. Kreet looked at the man she knew as Ka’Plo. He wore plain cloth that was wrapped with a similarly colored belt. He looked nothing like the other Adventurers she had seen.

“I have to pee,” she said to him.

“That may be a problem, Kreet. I’ll need to let you out of your cage. Will you run away if I let you out?”

Kreet looked around her. They were on a hill, beside a large boulder. There were woods not far, and a road ran by them in front of the woods. She considered if she should run away.

“No. I have no where to go. You haven’t hurt me yet. I’ll stay with you.”

“Okay Kreet. I don’t want to keep you as a prisoner, nor as a pet. If you don’t want to stay with me, you don’t have to. But you will probably die if you leave me Kreet. I don’t want you to die, and I don’t think you do either. So please don’t run away.”

“I will run away if I want to, Ka’Plo. But I don’t want to now. I want to pee.”

He laughed at her again. “Okay Kreet. You go do your business and come back when you’re done. I’m tired though, and need to sleep soon.”

The door of the cage lifted and she looked around, then up at Ka’Plo. She noticed then that he had white hair in his beard and on his head. “You’re old,” she said, then looked around for an appropriate place.

“Yes, Kreet. I’m old. Does that bother you?”

Kreet shifted her clothing and relieved herself. “Yes. You are easy to kill. If someone wants to kill Kreet you won’t stop them.”

“Fair enough,” he said, turning away. “But I will try not to let that happen. Also you really shouldn’t pee in front of other people Kreet.”

“No,” she agreed. “It is a vulnerable position. But you are my friend, right? You won’t kill me so it’s okay.”

“I suppose so,” Ka’Plo said as she rearranged her clothes and stepped back into the cage.

“Kreet, you don’t have to go back in the cage.”

“No? Where should I go?”

“What I said before, I meant Kreet. You can leave if you want. I’m hoping you won’t want to leave, but you can. I can’t be guarding you day and night.”

“I don’t want to leave. But where should I go if not back in the cage?”

“Well, anywhere you want really. Are you hungry?”

At this Kreet’s eyes lit up, quite literally, in the dark.

“Food! Do you have food? I am very hungry!”

“Sure,” said the man, pulling some things out of his pack. “Here, I’ve got a lot of jerky, and I picked some mushrooms and moss while you were sleeping. When we get back to my home tomorrow I have much more.”

Kreet snatched up the food eagerly. She gobbled the moss instantly, though it wasn’t the sweet kind she liked best. The mushrooms she picked through.

“You pick bad mushrooms, Ka’Plo. Some of these would kill me. But it’s okay, I know the good kind from the bad kind.”

“I’m sorry Kreet. I know kobolds, but I don’t know mushrooms I’m afraid. Would it be okay if I light a fire? I’d like to make some soup.”

Kreet looked at the man’s eyes. “A small fire, right? I don’t like big fires.”

“A small fire, I promise,” he assured her and set to work. Kreet nibbled some more mushroom and then crept up behind the man. She watched him work his flint until he managed to light some dry grass, then he stacked on some small sticks until they caught as well.“

"You are a mage,” she said flatly.

The man coughed again, then said, “No Kreet. I’m no mage. I just know how to make fire. This kind of stone makes the sparks, see? Then I just make the sparks go into a little dry grass.”

“My father was a mage. He could make fire. Sometimes,” she said, watching the flickering flames as if entranced.

“Did he use stones like these?”

“No. He used a special stick. But it took longer. Big People do everything better.”

“I doubt that, Kreet.”

Later on, when the soup was ready, the man offered her some.

“Be careful, it’s very hot. Just sip it, like this…”

“OOOOO!” Kreet cried, unable to duplicate the sipping that the Big Person had done.

“Oh, I’m sorry Kreet! Just wait till it cools down.”

“My tongue hurts,” the little kobold cried.

“Here, have some cool water… There, does that help?”

Kreet nodded. But a few minutes later she was fine and tried the soup again. The taste was very strange, but also very good. Finally, when she’d had enough, she sat back against the rock they had sheltered by.

“What are those? Are they stars?” she asked while Ka’Plo doused the fire.

“Oh! Yes, they are. Do you know about stars?”

“My brothers used to tell me about them. They’re beautiful sparklys!”

Ka’plo laid out his bedroll and crawled inside while Kreet watched.

“You will sleep in there?” she asked, curious.

“I will. It gets cold outside at night. I have an extra blanket if you need one.”

Kreet crawled under the bedroll with the man. “I don’t need one. You are warm enough.”

The man seemed startled, but then put his arm around her. Soon he was sleeping. She was surprised by how much his snoring sounded like her clan when they were sleeping too. She wasn’t sleepy herself, but she was very warm and comfortable. She decided she wouldn’t try to kill Ka’Plo in his sleep after all. He was a good man, and he wasn’t one of the Adventurers that killed her clutch. Instead she wriggled all the way under the blanket with just her snout pointing out, and eventually she went to sleep too.

She did have a brief moment of panic when the man turned over in the middle of the night and she was afraid he might crush her, but he shifted to make room for her and she got her tail out from underneath him and managed to go back to sleep.

The morning was bright to her eyes, but not intolerable. Ka’Plo said the sun was behind the clouds though, and so she was spared blinding direct sunlight. Still, she asked him for a bit of thin cloth that she happily took and fashioned a sort of blindfold that she wore the rest of the day that still allowed her to see without hurting her eyes.

“You’re very good with those hands, Kreet!”

“Do you think so? I’m not as good as my mother was, but she showed me how to do things. I could fix your robe if you want me to,” she said as they packed up and began to resume their journey.

“When we get home,” he said, “that would be wonderful! I am a poor man, Kreet. You should know that. But I have a modest cabin in some woods not too far away. We should get there by noon.”

They started walking down the road, but Kreet began to find it hard to keep up with Ka’Plo’s stride. When he asked her if she would like to ride on his shoulders, she fairly beamed with joy.

“Kreet, you should tell me when something’s bothering you! I’ve tired you out trying to keep up with me, haven’t I?”

“No!” she shouted, trying to climb up his legs belying her protests. “I’m not tired! I can keep up with you fine!” she said, her muscles protesting. “But, if you want me to ride on your shoulders, I will not mind.”

“Here,” he said, squatting down so she could climb up. “Hop on board, Kreet.”

They passed a few travelers on the way, and Kreet was deathly afraid they would see her and kill her, but in fact they just gave her an odd look and continued on.

“Kreet, you should learn some of our words, don’t you think? Can you say this… See if you can say ‘hello’”

It took some repetition, but before long she was greeting the other travelers with a hearty “Hello Sir, or Hellow Ma’am!”.  However, Ka’Plo had to explain the difference between “Sir” and “Ma’am” a few times.

“Don’t be silly, Ka’Plo. Of course I know the difference between men and women. But it’s a lot easier to tell in a clan. You know everybody and have seen between their legs before. You Big People are so wrapped up in clothes there’s no way to tell!”

“Well, usually our women have longer hair, but that’s not always true either. And only the men have beards, so that’s another way to tell.”

“The elves don’t have beards,” Kreet stated, rather proud of her knowledge she’d learned at her father’s kneee.

“That is true. Also if they talk, women’s voices are higher pitched. Breasts are another way.”

“What are breasts?”

Ka’Plo laughed. He’d finally explained laughter to her some time earlier. Then he held his hands under his chest. “These things. Women have them. Men don’t.”

Kreet scratched her head, but accepted it. When the next travelers passed, she spotted them.

“The one on the left is a woman, isn’t she? She has breasts!”

“Yes, that’s a woman alright.”

Kreet looked down at herself. “I don’t have breasts.”

Ka’Plo sighed. “No Kreet. Kobolds don’t have breasts. They’re for ‘nursing’, and you don’t ‘nurse’.”

“Nursing,” Kreet said the unfamiliar word and Ka’Plo had to explain.

Finally they turned off the road onto a small path and into some woods where Ka’Plo’s cabin stood, decrepit but serviceable.

“I wish I had breasts,” Kreet said, climbing down from Ka’Plo’s shoulders.

“Kreet, even if your kind had them, you would be too young anyway. There’s no good in wishing for something you can’t have anyway. Now let me show you around.”

Kreet understood the wisdom of his words. She would never be Big. She would always have a tail. She would always have a snout. Her scales would never be skin. She would never have a beard. She would never have breasts. She would never have a clan. She would never fit in.

———————–

Ka’Plo never did understand why she looked so sad when he showed her the little cabin, but he knew she’d been through a lot and after she’d been introduced to the cat and the little outhouse behind the one-room shack, he left her alone in a corner to cry a little while he busied himself getting some food together for them.  

He looked at her occasionally while he cooked. Most people would see a little monster at best – all fangs, claws, scales and tail. But he had spent years studying her kind. He’d even adopted another many years ago, though that hadn’t ended up well, for him or the ‘bold. And now he’d killed the last of the kobolds in the caverns too. True he hadn’t actually killed them, but he might as well have. In his studies he had become a local expert and had mapped most of the major passages of the caverns, primarily looking for kobolds. They were elusive enough creatures, but every time some group of Adventurers would go into the caverns and run across a clan, he would learn more of them by careful examination of the carcasses left behind.

Yet he was poor. No matter his expertise in the little dragons, there simply was no money in being a kobold scholar. This last band had needed a guide, and he had agreed, and now regretted with every fiber of his being. But he also knew there was only one kobold clan left in the caverns. He could not have imagined that this group would actually find them! But find them they had, and they had done what everyone before them had done. Mass slaughter. They had cut the angry little lizards down without hesitation. They had to have some reason for all that armor and weaponry of course, and killing kobolds had become that reason far too quickly.

Then a miracle had happened. This one little kobold had survived. She would be his life, he swore. He would do anything he could to keep her alive. When he had slightly ‘revised’ the Adventurer’s map after the slaughter, he slid it back in their pack with a glad heart. They would never emerge from the caverns again. It was little enough retribution for what they’d done to Kreet’s family, but it would have to do.